Menu

Why an abstract can help your PDF documents

Yesterday I mentioned adding content to your PDF documents, especially if they were produced by someone else; if you’re a distributor, for example, it might be a brochure from a manufacturer which doesn’t even mention your company. I mentioned that there was no reason why you couldn’t put a page (or more) on the end, adding your company profile and possibly even background information. It might have been worth mentioning, however, that in many cases there’s no reason why you couldn’t add pages to the front of the document, especially if they formed an abstract of what was to follow. Search engines can only index so much, and they’ll start with what’s at the front. The first text they come across, which might well be contents, disclaimers and the like, is not necessarily going to be particularly good stuff. Why not summarise the document – with lots of good search terms included – as a cover sheet? I can promise you Google will love that.

Discussion

We create a landing page for each distinct document with a summary on that page, so we can expose it to SEO directly – especially when we require the visitor to register to obtain that document. While we DO add SEO-friendly descriptions, etc. to each PDF, I would like your comments about this technique vs what you are recommending.
Rgds
John